Picnic at Hanging Rock Is Back—This Is How 3 Top Designers Have Interpreted the Cult Film

Few films have captured the imagination of the fashion world quite like Picnic at Hanging Rock. The 1975 Australian film, based on a 1900 novel by Joan Lindsay, follows six Edwardian-era schoolgirls and their headmistress on a day trip to Hanging Rock, a cliffside park in Victoria, Australia. There, through mysterious, unexplained circumstances, the girls begin to go missing.

While the plot will leave you thinking, it’s really the movie’s costumes that have made the greatest impact on fashion. As they explore the dense woods and cliffside fauna, all six girls wear lace and cotton dresses with various ruffles, ribbons, and pleats that belie the sinister, sexual undercurrents of the film. That contrast between the pure and the prurient has inspired designers from Lee McQueen to Raf Simons, while the general loveliness of those ivory dresses has cast an even wider spell over fashion.

Today, Amazon is debuting a remake of the original film as a six-part miniseries. While the fashions are more contemporary by design—read: fewer ruffles, more straw hats—it’s sure to inspire designers for the Spring 2019 season this September.

Until then, relive three collections from Fashion Weeks past that have cited Picnic at Hanging Rock’s Edwardian style.

Lee McQueen’s famous chessboard collection referenced Picnic at Hanging Rock in its opening looks. The tiny blazers, navy and gray wool pants, and bits of Edwardian lace were drawn from the school uniforms of the movie’s main characters Miranda, Irma, Marion, Rosamund, Sara, and Edith, remixed with a decidedly more boyish spirit. From there, the show might have developed into football padding and racer jumpsuits, but the delicate purity of those opening looks remains one of its most poignant messages.

Gray gowns and black gothic prints may not instantly read Picnic at Hanging Rock, but Erdem’s Fall 2010 collection was inspired in part by the film. As he told Vogue’s Sarah Mower at the time, he was drawn to the survivalist motifs within the movie—what would those girls look like after spending days on the mountain? How would they learn to survive? His line of capes, armor-like minidresses, and elegant gowns provided a protective wardrobe for contemporary young women against the trials of the modern world.

Raf Simons’s swan song at Christian Dior was an all-out homage to the 1975 film. From the delicate underpinnings to the sweet, scalloped-edge knits, the collection had a pretty lightness that evoked the tenderness of film with a sort of subversive twist. And don’t forget, the models walked amid man-made hills of delphinium. Simons described it as “a calm one, and very soft—away from the overdone. I didn’t want to embellish. So I was thinking about the South of France—rainbows and the simple things. And there’s a bit of Victoriana: something of that film Picnic at Hanging Rock. With a slight sexual undertone of darkness.”